David McElroy

I felt panic when I got the photo assignment. I was an 18-year-old part-time reporter and photographer with only a couple of months experience. Sports editor Mike Kilgore handed me a piece of paper with an assignment for later that night — and I had no idea how to do what he wanted.

The assignment was simple. I was to shoot pictures of a basketball game at Cordova High School, a small school about 10 or 15 miles outside of town. But I had never covered a basketball game. I had no idea what to shoot — and I told Mike that.

“Oh, you’ll be fine,” he told me. “Just get in a position to one side or the other behind the basket and shoot what feels right.”

The game was a blur to me. Since I didn’t know what I was doing, I shot several rolls of film, hoping for one usable photo. I felt as though I was in way over my head. The gym was badly lit. I didn’t know a soul there. I couldn’t move the camera fast enough to catch the action.

I walked out feeling like a failure. I was scared to turn my film in.

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Starting when I was a freshman in college, I worked as a part-time newspaper reporter. As the youngest and most inexperienced person in my newsroom, I was given the assignments nobody else wanted. The job taught me how little I knew about people.

I frequently went to a home or office out in the middle of a rural nowhere — on a dirt road 30 or 40 miles from the office — and I couldn’t imagine the people there could have anything interesting to say. It was a prideful attitude from a young man who thought too much of himself.

I soon discovered that even the most mundane person has a story — some meaningful narrative about what he’s seen or felt or lived through. Many times, though, their stories seemed so routine to them that they didn’t recognize the drama or inspiration that they had to share.

I often left interviews with “boring” people — folks who I’d met with a feeling of disdain — with a sense of humility and a realization that I was the one who didn’t yet have much wisdom to share.

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You can get to know a stranger pretty well in six hours — but can you come away knowing yourself better? Maybe. This long night makes me think so.

It was a chance encounter. We were both strangers looking for something — maybe neither of us knew what — when we found each other Saturday night. I was restless and needed to get away from my house. She was frustrated with the people at her house and was escaping them.

It was around 10 p.m. when I got to Whataburger in Trussville. I picked it because it was open all night and because I seem to keep being drawn back there lately, since it’s a place where I used to go all the time. She walked in with a self-assurance that suggested she would own any room she walked into. The place was mostly empty and it wasn’t long before we were chatting, first across a couple of tables and then across my old booth as she joined me there.

Her name is Delaney. She’s a tall blonde woman with blue eyes and she looks as though she would have been at home as a hippie in the ’60s. Some of that was the way she dressed but part of it was the way she carried herself — as though she sees right through everybody and says things others are too polite to say.

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